Trump Says He’ll Stop Taking Hydroxychloroquine

“I think the regimen finishes in a day or two. I think it’s in two days,” Trump said during a meeting in the White House Wednesday.

The Food and Drug Administration, the country's drug regulatory authority, has warned against using the drug outside of clinical trials to treat the Coronavirus.

The U.S. still leads the world in coronavirus cases and deaths.

After widespread controversy in American medical circles, it appears that President Donald Trump will abandon his “magical” treatment of Coronavirus. The president said he would soon finish taking hydroxychloroquine as a precautionary measure against infection with the Coronavirus.

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), sold under the brand name Plaquenil among others, is a medication used for the prevention and treatment of certain types of malaria. Other uses include treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and porphyria cutanea tarda.

This ends a controversy over that medication that has drawn widespread criticism from people and health experts. “I think the regimen finishes in a day or two. I think it’s in two days,” Trump said during a meeting in the White House Wednesday. Trump announced earlier this week that he was taking a daily dose of that drug, which is commonly used to treat malaria. The death toll from the epidemic is still high in the United States.

The Food and Drug Administration, the country’s drug regulatory authority, has warned against using the drug outside of clinical trials to treat the Coronavirus. “Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing COVID-19,” the FDA warned in a statement. Experiments are still underway to determine if there are any uses of this drug to treat people with this strain of the virus. However, Trump described the warnings in medical studies as “hostile.”

The United States continued to top the list of the countries most affected by the pandemic, recording 1,561 deaths from the new Coronavirus during the past 24 hours. This exceeds the total number of deaths caused by the Covid-19 epidemic in many countries, according to a Johns Hopkins University census Wednesday evening. The United States still alone accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s deadly virus deaths of more than 326,000.

Chloroquine is a medication primarily used to prevent and treat malaria in areas where malaria remains sensitive to its effects. Chloroquine is also occasionally used for amebiasis that is occurring outside the intestines, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus erythematosus.

The United States also tops the world in the number of people infected with the COVID-19 epidemic, with 1.55 million infected out of 12.6 million laboratory tests. University of Baltimore-based data showed that more than 294,000 people living with coronavirus in the United States have recovered.

After the United States recorded more than 2,000 deaths a day with coronavirus, during the period between the beginning of April and the beginning of May, the daily death toll during the past ten days has become less than 2,000 cases. In fact, it has sometimes even fallen below a thousand deaths a day.

In turn, the number of new daily infections with the virus decreased compared to that in mid-April, as the United States recorded about 20,000 new infections daily (23,600 between Tuesday and Wednesday). According to a scale developed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts based on nine epidemiological models, the United States is expected to record 113,000 deaths with Covid-19 by June 13.

This study, published Tuesday in conjunction with E. Resolution, states several procedures to reopen their economies, thereby expecting about 22,000 additional deaths in the US because of the emerging Coronavirus within 25 days.